Boundaries of the Educational Imagination

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Boundaries of the Educational Imagination

WAY N E H U G O

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Published in 2016 by African Minds 4 Eccleston Place, Somerset West, 7130, Cape Town, South Africa

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CC 2016 Wayne Hugo

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Abbreviations

ADEA Association for the Development of Education in Africa BRICS Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa

HDI human development index IQ intelligence quotient

LEDC less economically developed countries MEDC more economically developed countries MiRTLE mixed reality teaching and learning environment MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT multiple intelligence theory

SACMEQ Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality

TED Technology, Entertainment, Design UNE University of New England

UNESCO United Nations Economic, Social and Cultural Organisation

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Introduction

The educational imagination is not free to wander and drift without discipline.

It has to work with what is specifically educational, learn to push its boundaries, twist and leap within and beyond its rules in ways that illuminate. There is a discipline to the educational imagination and this book sets out to make explicit its building blocks and processes, as well as demonstrate it in action. To stretch the educational imagination means first being able to recognise its boundaries.

We can start intuitively with a natural level of focus: a teacher with learners in a classroom working through a lesson. The problem is that we quickly find ourselves in a kind of Russian doll situation: dolls within dolls within dolls. It is hard to work out what the biggest and smallest dolls should be and how they all relate in educational terms. The classroom is part of a school within a district. Learners are in a grade: let’s take grade 6 as a middle point. A more complex grade awaits them and a simpler grade is already completed. They are in stages of development with intellectual, linguistic, emotional, moral, aesthetic and physical dimensions that are not necessarily harmonised; and they live within different communities revolving around family and friends. The teacher is either still inexperienced in her specialisation, experienced, or an expert carrying all the traces of her own educational experiences. The lesson has its elementary components and is a part of a larger subject curriculum that is sequenced for increasing complexity. It is also located in a day that has moved from a previous lesson towards another lesson or break. At its simplest Boundaries of the Educational Imagination asks you to continuously move between larger and smaller sets whilst looking for connections and links. We can catch these elementary operations diagrammatically.

Dolls within dolls within dolls (figure i.1): the largest includes the smallest.

The educational imagination has to learn how to climb through these levels from smallest to largest, from concrete to abstract, from particular to general, from part to whole.

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Figure i.1 Inclusive hierarchical levels

Dolls within dolls within dolls are linked together in complex patterns (figure i.2).

The educational imagination has to learn how to negotiate the differences and inter-relationships between different systems.

Figure i.2 Different sets of hierarchical levels connected together

The patterns sketched out above continue to expand outwards, upwards, inwards and downwards. The school district expands outwards to province, country, subcontinent and continent; developing or developed region; east or west, north or south; and on a global scale. The school also exists in a space that expands outwards to the suburb, community and locality with all the complexities of class, race, gender and culture attached. The teacher brings more than her growing expertise: she has networks that operate across the grades she teaches, the subjects she specialises in, the administrative and leadership roles she occupies, and the professional bodies to which she belongs. Her pedagogy is a mixture of deep habits developed over her own lengthy period in school as a learner, the practices encouraged as she specialised in the profession and the embedded traditions of

Hierarchical

Heterarchical

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the school where she teaches. Lessons are part of the curriculum that is a part of a subject discipline with experts working at the cutting edge producing new knowledge that slowly makes its way back to the lesson in the future.

Going inwards we find that thought and language processes, and emotional, moral and bodily responses, break down into elementary units that suddenly jump to physical reactions and down to the ways proteins, cells, genes, molecules and atoms combine in a frenzied hum that we cannot hear or see across and inside teachers, learners, desks and chairs. The lesson breaks down into elementary meaning units, action units, concept units and communication units. These are built up from smaller bits that also dissolve into basic letters, synapse and sound. The lesson depends on more basic skills that go down and down into ABCs and 123s and the essential habits of the body. The simple lesson with its teacher and learners is a pulsing locus of higher and lower forces, bigger and smaller powers, longer and shorter rhythms that work slowly or quickly in intense or muted ways across landscapes riven with inequality stretching into abstract heights and emotional depth.

How to imagine and describe the smallest and largest dimensions of education, as well as its heights and depths, is the central task of this book. It is all about the development of an educational imagination. To enable this stretching, each chapter expands and contracts education through six questions:

1. What happens as we expand outwards from the materiality of one school to the collective materiality of all the schools of the world?

2. What happens when we sharpen our focus towards the increasingly smaller material parts of a school, shifting from school to classroom to desks, chairs and teaching and learning equipment?

3. What happens when we focus on the smallest functional learning components inside the body of an individual student?

4. What happens when we focus on the internal heights of development an individual student can reach on a learning path?

5. What happens when we focus on the collective heights our human species can reach on an education development path?

6. What happens if we focus on the smallest components of learning and ask how these combine to produce increasingly larger sets of knowledge?

Boundaries of the Educational Imagination starts off by taking one school and then adding more and more to the story until we reach all the schools of the world.

This works by taking an already existing whole (a school) and then adding to it more and more wholes like it until a complete set of all the schools of the world is reached. The basic logic can be visualised as expanding sets growing ever larger, from one school, to schools in a ward, wards in a districts, districts in a province, provinces in a country, countries in a region, regions in the world. Figure i.3 catches the first four levels.

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Figure i.3 From one school outwards to all schools

Second, we focus on one school and take a look inside it at its parts (figure i.4).

Figure i.4 From school to class to desks and chairs

The first two chapters explore the collective materiality of schooling in time and space. One way to understand what they are about is to imagine a highly intelligent alien studying our educational system from above. We can call the alien

‘Tau’. Tau, From hir (his and her) spaceship, Tau can identify and track all the schools of the world as well as the human beings entering and leaving schools, but cannot come down and interview or probe us (although occasionally Tau does indulge.) What would Tau be able to say about schooling on Earth watching from above, day after day, year after year, century after century? What would Tau make of the millions of schools that suddenly mushroomed all over our planet, of the different kinds of schools in more developed and less developed countries; how we treat so many children who are not white, how we separate out those with

S S

S

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5 S

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school Ward

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ChairDesk Class School

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long hair and those with short hair? The first two chapters deal with the visible mass appearance of schooling on our planet; the material collective effort of the way we educate ourselves (figure i.5).

Figure i.5 The collective/material dimension of educational processes

The third chapter shifts focus from the material collective of schooling to the materiality of the individual student placed inside this massive effort. We shift from the smallest functional elements of a school (its chairs, desks and learning equipment like paper) to a learner sitting on one of the chairs and ask: what is the smallest material working unit of learning inside the learner’s body? This takes us into the brain and the way it intersects with student learning. There is a difference between the fibres of paper in a schoolbook and fibres in the brain.

This signals a radical shift from desks and chairs inside the collective materiality of schools to the individual materiality of a student inside school (figure i.6). It’s a massive jump into a completely different world, although each touches the other with the learner sitting inside a classroom, at a desk, writing an answer to a question with a pen.

It is hard to track the smallest material learning unit inside human beings. We have an interior inside us that is very different from the interior spaces of a school building.

We have both a physical interior that is about our brains, neurons and synapses; and a mental interior that is about our minds with their thoughts, emotions and will.

When we focus on the individual materiality of a student, it is hard to separate the meat of the brain from the aliveness of its functioning and that is why we use the word embodied. Working memory is our educational starting point here and the third chapter tracks how its limited capacity, dealing with around four elements at any given time, still allows for a massive expansion of learning inside us.

Education does not exist only to make us rational and productive citizens, but it has means, at its highest levels, to teach us how to reach the peaks of interior human experience. Our educational imagination cannot stop at the end of university, but has to pursue what we are at our very best and what education can do to enable this transcendence deep within our individual beings.

Schools of the world

M A T E R I A L

C O L L E C T I V E

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Figure i.6 The material/collective and the material/

individual dimensions of educational processes

The fifth chapter shifts from the interior heights and depths of an individual learner to what is happening to education at the collective level. Jean Piaget hoped that by studying the interior development of one child he could track the collective development of our species, not in terms of physical development but of knowledge. It was our collective interiority that he was after.

Those familiar with the work of Ken Wilber will recognise that the organisational base of this book uses his four quadrant model (figure i.8) and many other of his insights contained in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution.

Chapter five asks where the education of our species is pushing us, tracking the way knowledge growth is forcing education beyond its current capacities into a new world where any one of us can access the knowledge of the world in a pedagogically structured form at any time.

This opens up the question of how to structure knowledge pedagogically. So with the sixth question we stay with knowledge, but enquire about the smallest elements of instructive knowledge. How do they combine into larger and larger groups, eventually setting up the possibility of all the elements combining in systematic and creative ways to construct a world classroom where all knowledge is pedagogically available in a smart device held in our hands?

The journey of the educational imagination takes us through four spaces:

the collective materiality of schools; the individual materiality of a student; the

M A T E R I A L

Physical student/

teacher

M A T E R I A L

I N D I V I D U A L C O L L E C T I V E

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Figure i.7 The collective/material, individual/material and individual/

interior dimensions of educational processes

interior depths of a student; and the collective depths we have reached as a species through knowledge. It is an achievement so massive we now have to spend over twenty years of intensive education of our young just to get the basics of our own reproduction as a species in place.

But it’s not just through travelling across these four spaces that we stretch the educational imagination. It’s also what we do inside each of the quadrants.

At the heart of all these chapters lies the modest request to take whatever educational process or object is the focus and ask: what are the levels above and below it? How many levels can you go up and down without losing educational purchase? In this question lies the artfulness of the device: it forces you to climb up and down educational landscapes with the instruction that you stop when the levels lose their pedagogic reach. The basic modus operandi of this book is to work with what is overhead and underneath the level on which you are currently concentrating.

Sometimes you will be working with the highest or lowest level, so then there are only two possible levels. But most of the time, the level of focus will have one above and another below it (figure 1.9). To become adept at using your educational imagination it is vital that you always try to think beyond the working level by going one level up and one level down, at the same time looking for equivalent elements that add richness to the level at which you are working. Level 0 is the co-ordinate level; level -1 is the sub-ordinate level; and level +1 is the super-ordinate level.

I N T E R I O R M A T E R I A L

Levels of development

Physical student/

teacher

M A T E R I A L

I N D I V I D U A L C O L L E C T I V E I

N D I V I D U A L

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Figure i.8 The collective/material, individual/material, individual/interior and collective/interior quadrants of educational processes

Figure i.9 Basic levels of analysis

You can illustrate this with the collective materiality of schools by shifting down a level to the classroom and its contents; or up a level to its location in a ward, and then you keep going from ward to district to province to country to region to continent and to the world. But don’t rush the upward and downward journeys: stay with the level for a while, looking for similar and different types at the current level of focus,

Levels of development

Physical student/

teacher

Knowledge

I N D I V I D U A L C O L L E C T I V E I

N D I V I D U A L C O L L E C T I V E

L+1

L 0

L-1

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and practise working with similarities and differences as well as ranges of scale. If it’s the materiality of an individual student that is the focal point, then start with the astonishing limitations of working memory and watch as it builds up and uses long-term memories to enable the brain to work with larger and more complex knowledge forms. If it’s the internal development of an individual young learner just entering secondary school, then imagine her at the concrete operational stage but be open to developments into formal operational and the shift away from sensorimotor levels of reasoning. Then keep going inwards and upwards, if you can, beyond formal operational into more synthetic, holistic and integrating forms of logic. If it’s the collective growth of our knowledge, then ask how it is that we as a species are pedagogically dealing with its exponential development, not only by looking at its largest sweep, but how the art of teaching knowledge works with its smallest units.

In summary, these chapters indicate the beginnings of ways to imagine the beauty of education using two simple distinctions: the first between individual and collective forms of education (figure i.10); and the second between material and interior dimensions of education (figure i.11; Wilber, 2000).

Figure i.10 Distinction between individual and collective

Figure i.11 Distinction between interior and material

A combination of these two distinctions gives four spaces the educational imagination can travel through (figure i.12): 1– material collective; 2 – material individual; 3 – interior individual; and 4 – interior collective (Wilber, 2000).

Within each space a strict instruction is followed: climb up and down levels as much as possible without losing educational focus (figure i.13).

In the conclusion we show how this journey of the educational imagination through four spaces, using a simple hierarchical climbing mechanism, provides the groundwork for you to begin to understand the field of education studies, a field that is crucial both for the profession of teaching and the reproduction of the academy.

INDIVIDUAL

COLLECTIVE

I N T E R I O R

M A T E R I A L

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Figure i.12 Four quadrant model of educational process

Figure i.13 Climbing through levels within each quadrant

Boundaries of the Educational Imagination is the second of a quartet of educational texts that sets out some of the basic tools needed to analyse education and develop an educational imagination. It stands apart from Cracking the Code to Educational Analysis (Pearson, 2013), Conceptual Integration and Educational

INDIVIDUAL

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COLLECTIVE

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COLLECTIVE

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Analysis (HSRC Press, 2015) and The Good Fight (forthcoming), but is a sister work. Cracking the Code provides a simple way to take any educational object, event or process and recognise, describe and analyse what it is and how it works.

Boundaries of the Educational Imagination takes an educational event and stretches it outwards from its smallest elements to its largest whole; and from its early and simple manifestations to the complex and profound heights it can reach. I feel this to be an elementary skill needed by anyone who takes education seriously.

If you don’t think through the smallest and largest, lowest and highest facets of education, then you have lessened your ability to locate where you are in the educational maelstrom and this limits your ability and imagination. Conceptual Integration provides a simple model to analyse and practise the transformative act of integration that sits at the heart of pedagogic practice. The Good Fight outlines the contested ethical justifications of education that often underlie and regulate curriculum disputes, pedagogic differences and assessment strategies, and shows pragmatic ways in which we negotiate this complex normative terrain. I mention the other three books to mark what this book does not do, so that it can do its actual job with focus and intent – take you on a wild ride to the boundaries of education and back again.

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Chapter 1 All the schools of the world

It has become possible to view every single school in the world from above.

Using Google Earth, you could spend a couple of years compiling a full list of all existing schools. There would be some minor classification problems around home schools, farm and village schools and some types of independent schools, but most schools in the world are obvious to the naked eye, have some kind of a boundary and a special name that can be used as a label on a map. There is a well-built and run school directly below my house called Carter High School. If I floated above my desk, high into the sky, and looked down at the school, I would see the following on an average school day:

• Around forty cars neatly parked in allocated bays;

• Tarred roads inside the school premises allowing for easy access to all parts;

• Tarred roads outside, along with wide pavements, allowing easy access to and from the school;

• A traffic warden at the main school gate every morning, directing traffic;

• Cars pouring in and out of the school from around 07h15 to 08h00 to drop off learners;

• A well-kept school with two classroom blocks and one administration block. The classroom blocks are multi-level structures with views extending over the city;

• A clear boundary that makes what is inside ‘Carter High School’ and what is outside ‘not Carter High School’;

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• A massive expanse of manicured flat green fields rolling outwards from the school, bejewelled with the azure blue of the swimming pool on the one side and six tennis courts on the other;

• Repetition in many of the surrounding properties of Carter’s structure in miniature: well-kept houses with pools and manicured gardens.

If I carried on floating high above Pietermaritzburg, I would see other schools and start to notice very clear differences between one type of school that looked much like Carter and a second type of a far more impoverished nature. Mpande High School comes into view. The differences are palpable:

• Fewer cars parked more haphazardly;

• No tennis courts, no swimming pool, no rolling fields, no surrounding mansions, no tarred road inside the school complex;

• Footpaths leading off from the school in various erratic directions;

• Hardly any grass;

• A permeable fence not easy to see from above whereas Carter High School has used trees and shrubs to mark its boundary with natural markers.

As I float above my district, it is striking that most schools look like the second type (Mpande). Only a few schools of the first type are around, mostly in the leafy suburbs surrounding Pietermaritzburg. As I drift outwards, away from the centre, type two schools predominate. There seems to be a split between schools clustered close to the city in the suburbs and those further away.

Very occasionally, but obviously striking, a very different type of school comes into view. Separated from the rest of the world by massive expanses of trimmed and clipped fields and long, tree-lined entrances, the privileged world of a private school (like Hilton College) unwraps itself:

• A separate community all to itself containing within it everything needed to live and learn;

• Surrounding its internal infrastructure an external expanse of forest and water, embedding a sense of tranquil isolation;

• A vast array of different buildings: a church, theatre, clinic, administration buildings, hostels, classrooms – spread out but within walking distance of one another;

• Specialised sports fields, each with a clubhouse: hockey fields with AstroTurf, cricket fields with dedicated pitches, indoor arenas for basketball, and so on.

Type one/type two across the world

You could classify the extensional set of the ten million or so schools on Earth using this technique. Viewed from above, schools would reveal their secrets in the

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most obvious of ways. If we imagine an alien called Tau, located in a spaceship and doing Comparative Education 1000000001, looking down on all the schools of our world, what basic sense could be made? Working only with what Tau can see of our educational system, it would be hard to avoid the conclusion that it is structured to favour the privileged few over the disadvantaged many. If Tau were in any way an enlightened being, compassion for the majority of the three billion children of school-going age would be an over-riding emotion, along with righteous anger about the injustice of it all, combined with derisory laughter if Tau knew we tell ourselves stories on Earth about education giving everyone an equal opportunity to succeed. If Tau simply and crudely classified the world’s schools into type one (like Carter) and type two (like Mpande), a telling pattern would manifest itself across and within continents. A high frequency of type one schools would be found in North America, Europe, Australasia, Russia and some of eastern Asia. Type two schools would predominate in most of Africa, South America and southern Asia. This would correlate roughly with a simple map of the more economically developed countries (MEDC) and less economically developed countries (LEDC), loosely known as the North-South divide. If Tau were to draw a rough line across the world that divided it into where the majority of type one and type two schools were found, it would look something like this (figure 1.1), with type one predominantly in the North and type two mainly in the South:

Figure 1.1 North–South dividing line

A number of other simple indicators catch the difference between these two worlds (figure 1.2). In the MEDCs of the North fewer babies are born and die less frequently, you live for longer and earn more money. In the LEDCs of the South more babies are born and die more often, your life expectancy is low and you earn very little. In MEDCs there are more elderly who are mostly well off and well skilled; in LEDCs there fewer elderly and more youth, often unemployed and existing in survival mode, or working in low-paid, low-skill jobs. In an MEDC you

North-south line

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are very likely to live in an urban area; in an LEDC in a rural area, either trying to migrate to a city or squatting near one.

NORTH

SOUTH Age-sex pyramid

Age-sex pyramid Large proportion

of elderly

Few old people

Large proportion of children

MEDCs

• High GNP

• Low birth and death rates

• High levels of literacy

• Export mainly manufactured goods

• Most people have access to safe water and sanitation

LEDCs

• Low GNP

• High birthrates

• Falling death rates

• Low levels of literacy

• Limited access to safe water and sanitation

a)

b)

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Figure 1.2 a, b, c and d: Basic differences between more economically developed and less economically developed countries

The age-sex pyramid clearly reveals that MEDCs have a larger proportion of adults in comparison to children, resulting in a more skilled population overall; whereas LEDCs have a far larger proportion of children to adults, meaning that the burden of economically bringing children to adulthood is carried by a far smaller set of adults. Notice that the employment structure bar graph indicates that most adults in MEDCs have tertiary degrees and high skilled occupations, whereas in LEDCs most adults have only a primary education and struggle to secure highly skilled occupations. So you have more adults with higher qualifications and skills in MEDCs; and fewer adults who in the main have only a primary education in LEDCs. However, if the MECDs fail to produce enough children, the real threat arises that there will not be enough economically active young adults to look after

NORTH – Employment structure

SOUTH – Employment structure Primary

Primary Secondary

Secondary Tertiary

Tertiary

NORTH – Population

SOUTH – Population Rural

Rural

Urban

Urban d)

c)

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the growing elderly population expecting high levels of care.

All of these indicators correlate fairly strongly with education. The more educated a country is as a whole, the higher both gross national product and life expectancy tend to be.¹ However, it is not education we are concerned with in this chapter, but the materiality of schooling. There is not necessarily a correlation between the quality of a school building and the quality of education in a school.

As human beings we can think on our feet and commit with our hearts in the toughest of circumstances: we are not bound to the conditions in which we find ourselves, but they do provide the parameters within which we work. As Marx observed in his brightest of texts:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;

they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living (Marx, 1852, p. 277).

It is possible to enable a quality education experience in a poorly built and equipped school. There are always possible human choices and interactions in given circumstances. Nevertheless, having water, electricity, functioning toilets, desks, chairs and windows in a school helps.

As a rule of thumb, type one and two schools tend to spread across the Earth according to two spatial logics expressed in North-South and urban-rural distinctions. The North tends to have more type one schools than the South; just as urban areas tend to have more type one schools than rural areas. These two logics combine at a micro level as well. It is possible to have a division in the centre of a city between the two types of schools, just as in the suburbs, peri-urban, peri-rural and rural areas. Go into the most rural of areas and it will have its own tensions between more and less developed areas. Go into the suburbs and you will find similar divisions between more developed and less developed areas, and a tendency for corresponding types of schools within them.

It is an exceptionally crude set of ordering devices for the extensional set of schools on Earth and there are notable exceptions. But at the heart of it is an important and obvious logic that helps to understand how schooling on Earth works: the economic development of the space within which the school is located determines, to a large degree, what the school looks like from an aerial view.

As Tobler (1970) noted over forty years ago in what is now called the first law of geography, ‘Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things’.

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Between North-South and urban-rural

We are working with very crude logics that divide the world of schools into two simple types that work in two simple spatial ways, but it is the in-between zone that often offers the most interesting cases. Between urban and rural, and North and South, lie remarkable blends and hybrids. Take another look at the North-South dividing line in figure 1.2 and note the position of Brazil, India and China: all near the top of the bottom half and all members of BRICS with ambitions to become central players in world affairs. The danger with simple binaries is that they tend to become fixed objects rather than moving processes. The already developed North is finding, in its lack of population growth and aging demographic profile, a serious set of limitations to sustaining current living standards, initially forgotten about through borrowing but now full-blown. There are collapses downwards as others rise. That is the nature of things if you try to dominate and exploit: your time will run out and the wheel will turn.

The world is currently undergoing rapid urbanisation with massive peri-urban spaces surrounding cities. The space between urban and rural is where much movement is found; just as with the space between North and South. If it were movement that simply went from less dense to more dense, or from more distance between things to less, then we could simply stay with a ring model that shifted between a dense/close urban middle and a spreading out rural expanse. But mostly we are dealing with inequalities of relationship between urban and rural and North and South. The centre dominates, both in North and urban terms; and the periphery is exploited and stripped of its human and material wealth. The North-South division is not about different hemispheres; it is about colonialism, exploitation and domination that set up unequal flows between zones. It’s a contested zone, where dominance is challenged, especially by the in-betweens. It is in Brazil, India and China that you will find some of the most extensive sets of school building programmes; and most of these schools are built in the middle spaces between the urban centre and the rural outposts.

Tau, watching from above, would note that far more new schools are being built in the strongly developing South in comparison to the holding patterns of the North.

Regionality

This logic of North-South and urban-rural divides, and the spaces in between, becomes complicated as our beautiful planet turns and school after school comes into view, shifting from Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal to other regions in the province, to other provinces like the Eastern Cape and Western Cape if we slowly spin westwards with the sun. There are notably more type two schools in

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the Eastern Cape and their rhythms are markedly erratic and slow. In the Western Cape the number of type one schools increases, but something else is noteworthy:

the rhythms of type two schools improve. Students arrive more quickly, breaks are sharper, fewer cars leave during the morning, and there is more activity in the afternoons. It is not necessarily the case that type two schools have erratic rhythms as some can also show highly distinctive patterns characteristic of type one schools. This provides the most intriguing of possibilities: the way type two schools can get closer to type one schools is not through what they look like in a snapshot from above, but how their rhythms work during the day. This possibility seems to be linked to the way different regions (in this case provinces) work with what they have in terms of schools and other resources.

Individual provinces have their own histories, functioning patterns and alliances, along with distinct socio-economic levels of development, so it is hard to compare how each works with schools. One way is to compare how equally poor students in different provinces perform in a standardised test. This recognises the impact of poverty on educational performance, but challenges the assumption that poverty condemns everyone equally. Individuals, communities, district and provincial structures all respond to the issue of poverty in varying ways with differing degrees of success. Take a look at figure 1.3a, which depicts socio- economic background on the x axis and scores in a standardised reading test on the y axis, producing distinct provincial profiles. The wealthier the student socio- economic background, the more to the right of the figure it will appear; the better their scores, the higher they will appear (Nethengwe, 2008, p. 94).

The Western Cape has a wealthier student socio-economic background profile than all other provinces, but notice that its poorest students are performing far better than equivalent poor students in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. You can see this by drawing a straight line vertically upwards at the 50 mark on the x axis (figure 1.3b). The lowest intersection with this line is KwaZulu-Natal with students at this socio-economic level scoring around 550 on the reading score, then Gauteng with around 565 and the Western Cape high above at 600. Students at equivalent socio-economic levels perform very differently in their reading scores depending on their province.

The Northern Cape has many students who have very poor socio-economic backgrounds, but they are doing far better on average in the reading test than Limpopo, Eastern Cape, Free State, Mpumalanga and the North West. What makes the Northern Cape so interesting is not only that it has managed to produce relatively good results for poor students, but how most of its students are performing at around the same level. This is indicated by the flatness of the line, showing that students of different socio-economic levels are getting similar results. It indicates that in terms of education there is some measure of social equity, in which poorer students get a similar education to richer students.

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Figure 1.3a South African provincial performance in SACMEQ reading test

The same cannot be said for KwaZulu-Natal where the gradient of the line is very steep, indicating that poor students are doing badly in reading and richer students are doing well. This indicates that education is not breaking the reproduction of social inequality. Rather it is maintaining the status quo, with the rich going on to university and high-paid careers, and the poor condemned to continued poverty and the battle to find adequate housing, food supplies, warmth and water. Tau, listening in to the languages being spoken at home and at school in the Northern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, would note that there was a strong correlation between home and school language in the Northern Cape with most students able to take the reading test in their home language that was also the language used to teach at school. In KwaZulu-Natal, however, students mostly spoke one language at home and another in class. Those students in KwaZulu-Natal who spoke English at home and took the reading test in English did much better than those who spoke Zulu at home and took the reading test in English. The Zulu-speaking students, Tau would note, were also the poorest. Circling above us, Tau would weep over the injustice of it all.

-100 -80 -60 -40 -20 4000 20

420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560 580 600 620 640 660 Y

40 60 80

STUDENT SOCIOECONOMIC BACKGROUND

STUDENT READING SCORE

100 120 140 X

Eastern Cape Mpumalanga

Free State Limpopo

Northern Cape

KwaZulu-Natal

Gauteng Western Cape

PROVINCE QUALITY EQUITY

Trad Alt Soc Dist Western Cape 629 562 72 120

Gauteng 576 531 65 133

KwaZulu-Natal 517 513 76 147 Northern Cape 470 475 29 86

Free State 446 453 33 54

Eastern Cape 444 459 38 75

Limpopo 437 461 53 121

Mpumalanga 428 436 21 71

North West 428 429 6 41

AVERAGE 486 480 44 94

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Figure 1.3b South African provincial performance in SACMEQ reading test

As Tau shifted hir focus from provincial to country level, sie would see that some poor countries in terms of socio-economic level were producing good educational scores, while some relatively wealthier countries were producing comparatively bad results.²

Tanzania, for example, is one of the poorest countries in southern and eastern Africa. Its profile is completely on the left side of figure 1.4a, indicating severe poverty. But it is also very high up on figure 1.4a, indicating good scores on the reading test. It is producing academic results consistently higher than the wealthier South Africa. The richest students in South African public schools are performing at the same level as the poorest students in Tanzania and Kenya (figure 1.4b). Just as interesting are the Botswana and Mozambique lines in comparison with South Africa (figure 1.4c).

Students in Mozambique are almost all in a narrow poverty range with no great disparity between rich and poor, hence the short line. But notice how flat this line is. It indicates that no matter how poor you are in Mozambique, you tend to get the same quality of primary education.

-100 -80 -60 -40 -20 4000 20

420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560 580 600 620 640 660 Y

40 60 80

STUDENT SOCIOECONOMIC BACKGROUND

STUDENT READING SCORE

100 120 140 X

Eastern Cape Mpumalanga

Free State Limpopo

Northern Cape

KwaZulu-Natal

Gauteng Western Cape

PROVINCE QUALITY EQUITY

Trad Alt Soc Dist Western Cape 629 562 72 120

Gauteng 576 531 65 133

KwaZulu-Natal 517 513 76 147 Northern Cape 470 475 29 86

Free State 446 453 33 54

Eastern Cape 444 459 38 75

Limpopo 437 461 53 121

Mpumalanga 428 436 21 71

North West 428 429 6 41

AVERAGE 486 480 44 94

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Figure 1.4a SACMEQ II comparison combining quality and equity

Figure 1.4b SACMEQ comparison of Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa

-100

-120 -80 -60 -40 -20 4000 20

420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560 580 600 620 640 660

40 60 80

READING SCORE

“Traditional Quality” = Height of Centre of Line (High = Good)

“SACMEQ Quality”

(a) SES Adjusted Quality = Height of Line Intercept (High = Good) (b) Social Equity = Gradient of Line

(Flat = Good)

(c) Distributional Equity = Length of Line (Short = Good)

100 120 140 160 180 200

Seychelles

Mauritius

South Africa

Namibia Zambia Malawi

Lesotho

Zanzibar Uganda

Botswana Mozambique

Tanzania

Swaziland Kenya

SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL

-100

-120 -80 -60 -40 -20 4000 20

420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560 580 600 620 640 660

40 60 80

SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL

READING SCORE “Traditional Quality” = Height of Centre of Line (High = Good)

(Flat = Good)

100 120 140 160 180 200

South Africa Tanzania

Kenya

Most well off in South Africa Least well off

in Tanzania and Kenya

-100

-120 -80 -60 -40 -20 4000 20

420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560 580 600 620 640 660

40 60 80

SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL

READING SCORE

(Flat = Good)

100 120 140 160 180 200

South Africa

Long steep line Short flat line

Botswana Mozambique

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Figure 1.4a SACMEQ II comparison combining quality and equity

Figure 1.4b SACMEQ comparison of Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa

-100

-120 -80 -60 -40 -20 4000 20

420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560 580 600 620 640 660

40 60 80

READING SCORE

(Flat = Good)

100 120 140 160 180 200

Seychelles

Mauritius

South Africa

Namibia Zambia Malawi

Lesotho

Zanzibar Uganda

Botswana Mozambique

Tanzania

Swaziland Kenya

SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL

-100

-120 -80 -60 -40 -20 4000 20

420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560 580 600 620 640 660

40 60 80

SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL

READING SCORE “Traditional Quality” = Height of Centre of Line (High = Good)

(Flat = Good)

100 120 140 160 180 200

South Africa Tanzania

Kenya

Most well off in South Africa Least well off

in Tanzania and Kenya

-100

-120 -80 -60 -40 -20 4000 20

420 440 460 480 500 520 540 560 580 600 620 640 660

40 60 80

SOCIOECONOMIC LEVEL

READING SCORE

(a) SES Adjusted Quality = Height of Line Intercept (High = Good)

(b) Social Equity = Gradient of Line (Flat = Good)

100 120 140 160 180 200

South Africa

Long steep line Short flat line

Botswana Mozambique

Figure 1.4c SACMEQ comparison of Mozambique, Botswana and South Africa

Botswana, even though it has many students who are comparatively well off, also has a fairly flat line. South Africa, uncomfortably, has a long line, indicating great disparity between the rich and poor. It also has a steep line, indicating that the poor do badly and the rich do well.

These test results come from the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) and they clearly reveal that socio- economic levels of development are not the only factors to consider when trying to improve the quality of education. If very poor countries are producing better results than more wealthy countries, then we have to focus on regional as well as urban-rural and more developed-less developed logics.³ We can learn from our neighbours as much, if not more, than from the more developed North.

We must, however, be wary of only using one set of criteria when comparing countries. It is also vital, for example, to take a look at throughput rates from primary to high school. Mozambique has a very high level of drop outs, both in primary school and from primary to secondary school, indicating that although most of its children get a good basic education, many of them do not get anything more than that. By comparison, South Africa attempts to sustain high levels of access all the way from pre-primary to tertiary education. Many of my colleagues at universities across South Africa remark on how good African students are from across the border in comparison to local students. What is often not mentioned

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is how many of these African countries have deliberate policies that restrict secondary education to high performers in the primary phase, with many other learners simply dropping out; whereas in South Africa there is a sustained attempt to provide access across all levels.

So it’s not only North-South and urban-rural. There are real distinctions between regions located right next to one another and this holds for localities, provinces, countries and sub-continental regions. Some schools located in both the under-developed South and poverty-stricken rural areas show regular and precise rhythms that are regional in extent, rather than urban-rural or North- South.

This gives a third ordering device that works in expanding regions outwards from a single school. Starting from Carter High School in the Umgungundlovu district (with just over 500 schools), we expand outwards to KwaZulu-Natal province (with just over 6 000) and the Republic of South Africa (48 000), escalating to southern and eastern Africa (150 000), sub-Saharan Africa (600 000), the African continent (one million); and then, the most natural boundary of all, Earth as a whole (ten million schools). At each of these levels it is possible to compare what schools look like with equivalent regions, enabling comparisons at circuit, district, provincial, national, sub-continental and inter-continental levels, providing a nested spatial hierarchy of great comparative value.

Combining regionality with urban-rural and more developed-less developed If you are poor in South Africa and go to a type two school like Mpande, there is a very high chance that your score in standardised tests would be very low. If you are well-off financially and go to a type one school like Carter, there is an elevated chance you would have scored high in standardised tests. There are not many schools and learners between these two extremes: in South Africa you tend to go either to a type one or type two school with a sharp jump between the two. If you go to a type one school, the rule of thumb is that you do well; and if you go to a type two school, you do badly. In South Africa what counts is the school you go to: type one mostly gets you a university entrance matric; type two gets you a bare pass if you are lucky.

Figure 1.5 illustrates the point dramatically. The bar graph is split into the spread of performance inside schools (on the right) and the spread of performance between schools (on the left) and charts the differences between the fourteen countries that participated in the SACMEQ project. Seychelles has massive differences in the performance levels of its pupils within schools. South Africa has huge differences between schools, revealing the brutal history of apartheid still playing out in our system.⁴

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Figure 1.5 Between school and within school variation of average pupil reading scores in SACMEQ countries

We can demonstrate the same point with a different set of visual representations (figure 1.6a) taken from the excellent work of Spaull (2011). In South Africa we classify schools in quintiles. A quintile refers to the division of schools into five groups: quintile one represents schools located in the poorest of socio-economic areas and quintile five those in the wealthiest areas. What is interesting about school performance in the different quintiles is that performance in the SACMEQ tests is pretty much the same for schools in the first three quintiles, with quintile five rich areas showing a massive improvement in performance (Spaull, 2011, p. 9).

The profiles of the first three quintiles all show poor reading scores with hardly any students getting beyond 600 and most scoring around 400 (figure 1.6b).

The results are not much better for quintile four schools. Quintile five schools show a radically different profile with most performing at far higher levels with a peak at around the 700 mark (figure 1.6c).

Average pupil

reading scores Total variation in

reading scores

Seychelles (582) Seychelles (153)

Kenya (546) Kenya (79)

Tanzania (546) Tanzania (81)

Mauritius (536) Mauritius (148)

Swaziland (530) Swaziland (47)

Botswana (521) Botswana (78)

Mozambique (517) Mozambique (42)

SACMEQ (500) SACMEQ (100)

South Africa (492) South Africa (150)

Uganda (482) Uganda (83)

Zanzibar (478) Zanzibar (50)

Lesotho (451) Lesotho (34)

Namibia (449) Namibia (75)

Zambia (440) Zambia (72)

Malawi (429) Malawi (25)

150 100 50 0 50 100

12

36

28

38

17 20

12 37

104

48

12 13

45

23

7

142 43

53

110

29

58

29

63

45

36

37 21

30

49 18

Between-school Variation Within-school Variation

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Figure 1.6a South African student reading scores in SACMEQ II by quintile (kernel density in simple terms is a more accurate type of histogram that smooth

hard edges and represent data in a clear and more continuous way)

Figure 1.6b Quintile one, two and three schools all perform poorly in SACMEQ II

Density

Quintile 1 Quintile 2 Quintile 3

Quintile 4 Quintile 5

Student Reading Score 0

0.002.004.006.008

200 400 600 800 1000

Kernel Density of Student Reading Score by SES Quintile SACMEQ III South Africa

Density

0.002.004.006.008

200 400 600 800 1000

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Figure 1.6c Quintile five schools perform well in SACMEQ II

If you are located in the first four quintiles, then the probability is high that your life chances will not be dramatically enhanced by education. If you are in the fifth quintile, then your chances are much better. The result is that the rich get richer and the poor remain poor, a sobering reality to contemplate. In South Africa we have a bimodal education system with the first four quintiles showing one pattern and the fifth quintile another. It is appalling that where you were thrown into this world as a baby determines your success at school. We might want to believe that education provides everyone with an equal opportunity to succeed. But the truth is a far harder reality: where you are born strongly influences your performance.

Keep this pattern in mind and take a look at figure 1.7a that breaks down student socio-economic status in provincial terms (Spaull, 2011, p. 9).

It provides a clear representation of the socio-economic levels of the students who took the SACMEQ tests, with the Western Cape and Gauteng clearly the best off and the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal deeply impoverished (figure 1.7b).

But if you look closely (figure 1.7c) you will notice that many of the other provinces sit in between the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal on one side and the Western Cape and Gauteng on the other.

Density

0.002.004.006.008

200 400 600 800 1000

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Figure 1.7a Kernel density of student socio-economic status by province Density 0.1.2.3.4.5

2 1

0 -1

-2

Kernel Density of Student Socioeconomic Status SACMEQ III South Africa

Eastern Cape Free State

Limpopo North West

Mpumalanga Western Cape Gauteng KwaZulu-Natal

Northern Cape

Student SES

Density

Limpopo North West

Northern Cape

Student SES

0.1.2.3.4.5

2 1

0 -1

-2

1.7bi)

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Figure 1.7b Juxtaposition of socio-economic status of students in Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal with Western Cape and Gauteng

Figure 1.7c Socio-economic status of Northern Cape, Free State, Mpumalanga, North West and Limpopo

Density 0.1.2.3.4.5

2 1

0 -1

-2

Limpopo North West

Northern Cape

Student SES

Density 0.1.2.3.4.5

1 2

0 -1

-2

Limpopo North West

Northern Cape

Student SES 1.7bii)

Boundaries of the Educational Imagination